Spatial Visualisation | Introduction

Jan-Philipp Kolb

07/17/2015

Hello world

Drawing maps has a long history
Fra Mauro map is the greatest memorial of medieval cartography
Source: Wikipedia

Migrant route to Germany

Used at BBC - get an overview of more maps like this here

The road to Europe

Source: The independent

Data on the conflict in Syria - UNHCR
Analysis on Syrian Refugee Settlement Clinic Locations with R

GDP per capita

Data source: World Development Indicators

GDP in German federal states

GDP in billion Euro

Data source: Wikipedia

Polygon source: Global Administrative Areas (GADM)

Social index

Proportion of social benefits recipients in Berlin

Source: Tagesspiegel

The spatial perspective…

… is relevant to get an overview of current developments
… is relevant to understand circumstances.
More spatial visualisations are possible with data from web 2.0 etc.

A little quiz

maps of photographic/traffic activity around the world
data from flickr used
guess about picture taker’s mode of transportation
time stamps and distance traveled between a user’s pictures
- Black is walking (less than 7mph),
- Red is bicycling or equivalent speed (less than 19mph),
- Blue is motor vehicles on normal roads (less than 43mph);
- Green is freeways or rapid transit.

A little quiz

Source: Eric Fischer

The geotaggers world atlas

World Map Of Touristiness

Source: Touristiness

Based on tourist pictures uploaded on panoramio

Tracking Taxis Across Manhattan

Source: The New York Times

Target / Motivation

The target is to visualize social aspects in maps.

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More examples

Spatial? - Motivation

Massive amounts of data … and growing!
Often freely accessible on the web (e.g. through APIs)
Often unstructured or semi-structured (e.g. web documents, news archives), often heterogeneous
Often not intended for geographic purposes, but implicitly containing geographic info implicitly (Web 2.0)
Often with little or no metadata

Examples

Targets

I want to….

… show you examples of useful and less useful visualisations and applications.
… talk about the developments of maps/geography.
… clarify, why it is important for social sciences.
… show you how to produce your own maps/visualisations.
… tell you where you can find data.

Targets

Every participant should present his/her own maps.

Presentation of toolbox (R, Google API, OpenStreetMap etc.)
Learning by doing is very important

Personal information

University of Trier

Source: Website with city maps

Erasmus - Univerity Lyon III

Source: orangesmile

Organisation Gesis

Five departments - Survey Design and Methodology

Monitoring Society and Social Change
Data Archive for the Social Sciences
Computational Social Science
Knowledge Technologies for the Social Sciences

Gesis

GESIS is:

Infrastructure Services for social sciences
over 250 employees at three sites (Mannheim, Cologne)

GESIS offers:

Consulting for research projects in all phases
Research based services

Tasks GESIS-Team Statistics:

Consulting and research on …

Planning of survey designs
Development of sample designs for face-to-face, written, and telephone-assisted surveys
Data analysis and visualisation

Your background?

Where do you come from?
What are you studying?
What are your main research interests?

Tools and services

Why use R - It’s open source

It’s free
It’s open source
…

R is the leading tool for statistics, data analysis, and machine learning. It is more than a statistical package; its a programming language, so you can create your own objects, functions, and packages.

Source: http://www.r-bloggers.com/why-use-r/